La Vida De Los Muertos

In the Catholic Church, today is All Saints' Day, meant to commemorate those individuals who have already died and gone to heaven. Tomorrow on the Catholic calendar will be All Souls' Day, which recognizes those individuals who have died but who remain in purgatory, awaiting entrance into heaven. In Mexico, today and tomorrow also comprise El Día de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead), on which people remember and pray for loved ones who have died.

Today also marks two weeks since one of my dogs, Nellie Fox, a beagle-dachshund mix whom my wife and I rescued from the pound in 2002, passed away. Nellie took suddenly sick on the weekend of October 16-17. What seemed like a possible stomach ache or potentially passing illness on Sunday, October 17, escalated in the early morning of October 18. My wife and I rushed Nellie to a local emergency vet at 2:30 in the morning. This would turn into a trip for specialized care in Michigan about an hour and a quarter away. What was a furious and panicked drive north, when it seemed like Nellie could die at any moment, became hopeful, when she made it, the doctors stabilized her, and then they planned for surgery. When my wife and I left to head back home around 1:00 p.m., we knew the surgery might provide bad news in the form of cancer, but we also had hope. Nellie was awake, lucid, and stable when we left her. A little over an hour later, she was gone. During preparation for surgery, Nellie's heart gave out and the doctors were unable to resuscitate her.

I have felt pretty devastated by the loss of Nellie Fox, particularly since my wife and I had been getting her regular blood tests and checkups. Nellie's death has also extended a series of deaths that have hit my wife and I over the last few years. In May 2007, our chihuahua-terrier mix, Turbo, passed away after kidney failure. A year to the day later, my wife's mom died of a brain aneurysm. Then, this past May, my mom died of pancreatic cancer. Indeed, the very weekend that Nellie Fox became outwardly sick, I had gone to Indianapolis to commemorate my mom. A family friend, "Uncle" Dick McGowan, and his son, Cassidy, made an altar for my mom as part of the El Día de los Muertos display at the Indianapolis Art Center.

As I have been reflecting on these deaths over the last two weeks, I have found some comfort in the idea of El Día de los Muertos. The idea of celebrating, remembering, and engaging with the dead seems too overlooked in the culture that dominates United States society. Too often, people die, and the world seems to move on without pause, without consideration, without reflection, and sometimes even without sympathy. My wife commented on this when her mom died, I've felt it with the deaths of Turbo and my mom, and I'm feeling it as strongly as ever with the death of Nellie Fox. More time spent engaging with the dead, holding the things that they loved, focusing on vividly remembering the times we shared with them, and doing things that recall or honor them seems like a very spiritually useful and rewarding thing to do, not just for those of us still alive, but also for those who have died. Indeed, "un día" seems too little. "Una semana," "un mes," and even "un año" seem too little as well. So, I am proposing to spend and dedicate much more of my life for the dead--"mi vida para los muertos." I've already begun by making sure that I eat a banana--one of Nellie Fox's favorite foods--every day, thinking of Nellie when I do it.

On a related note, in a week and a half I will join millions of other people in going to the movie theater to watch the new Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, which depicts the first part of the seventh and final novel in the series. The morning of the day it opens, my "Reading Harry Potter" class, which I am teaching for the third time now this fall, will undoubtedly discuss it (though restrain ourselves somewhat for those who haven't seen it yet). I begin that course with an essay by C.S. Lewis called "Meditation in a Toolshed." In that essay, Lewis discusses the importance of both "looking at" and "looking along." He says we must both "look at" things, by examining them from outside of their perspectives, and "look along" things, by seeing the world from inside their perspectives. He argues that both are valuable for understanding the world. While we do a considerable amount of "looking at" in the Harry Potter course, I also consciously try to make sure that we "look along" Harry Potter, discussing what a perspective from inside the Potterverse offers the world. Among such things, the Harry Potter series, including to a large degree that seventh and final tale, offers us some ways to comprehend and come to terms with death--deaths of loved ones, deaths of people we do not know well, and deaths of ourselves. In the book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Albus Dumbledore tells Harry that "the true master [of death] does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying" (720). This comes six years after Dumbledore, in the first book in the series (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) tells Harry that "to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure" (297). It seems to me that looking along these ideas asks us to take stock of death more fully in life, not necessarily charging into death, but accepting death and seeking to find greater communion with our own mortality.

So much of the struggle with death comes from fears--fear of the unknown, fear of loss of one's self, fear of pain, and so on--and I have held these fears of death strongly throughout most of my life. But with my mom, my dogs, my mother-in-law, others I have known who have died, and the ideas presented by J. K. Rowling in mind, I seek a change in how I live life, embracing the dead more fully as part of my life, living with death instead of attempting to forget or deny its existence. I've only begun this new adventure, and I do not know where it will take me as I live it, but I also realize that I do not need or want to know, for that would not be in the spirit of living and walking with death. And realizing that does seem to organize my mind and my life quite a bit.